His theories about the Universe aside, which have no bearing on this project, it's well worth funding people like this, mainly because they think outside of the box.
Check this out. One guy who had a crazy idea in his garage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B8srudAUhE (using sound waves to extract hydrogen from salt water) Looks interesting at least, and worth possibly funding to see if anything practical can be done with it.
Often the best ideas come from applying simple technology in ways that aren't usually done. From what I can see, Lerner's design should work. Whether or not it can be made to be economical, though, I doubt it. But it certainly looks to be a lot smaller and more compact, which might lead to some interesting uses where normal power generation isn't feasible(moon base, for instance). If the claim that it has less harmful radiation to deal with is true, or if it rids us of the need for turbines, it would be a big step ahead of the current attempts.(which have cost us billions and still not worked, I might add)
Worth 1/8th the cost of a single M1 Abrams tank? I can think of worse things by far to spend our tax money on.
I forgot to add a couple of points of data/history.
The VMS Notes system ran on most every major original university and institution at the time on the original ARPANET. The university that I went to had a dedicated cable running from it 60 miles to U.C. Berkeley where it tied into the rest of the system(this was done way back in the early 70s when the university was created). As such, we could go to their library computers and reserve books and so on as well, and send inter-campus email. Long, long before you even had what we consider to be email today.
When the Notes program was created, you could all would participate in the forums, which was unlike a typical BBS in that it worked like a modern forum. Hopping from one forum to another wasn't very hard and nearly every California State and U.C. campus was linked together this way.
Usenet came much later as a commercial version of the same idea.
But within this group of VMS systems were created many online novels and works of community fiction, just like you typically get on a forum at most websites today. Some grew into actual published works and were often posted in chapters every few weeks to Usenet writing groups, most notably ones like rec.games.frp Fantasy and science fiction made up the vast majority, of course.
Unfortunately, modern internet archives only go back to about the mid 90s so virtually all of this has been lost.
http://www.peldor.com/intro.html Some, like this still exist. It started out as a collaborative effort for the first few chapters but then he took over and posted online on Usenet until 2000 or so.(about ten years). His work wasn't the first, though - just a notable example that still survives today.
We did the same thing online in 1991 at my university(technically 1985 or so - way before I got there). We had a 20-30 college mini net - a BBS system of sorts where all of their VMS machines were linked together. Vax Notes it was called.
Of course there were collaborative forums - it worked identical to Usenet Newsgroups.
http://www.byeday.net/assets/documents/Camelot%20of%20Collaboration%20Patti%20Anklam.pdf This was the very first attempt at something like this. Way before you even had any of the other forums/web/etc. Most people were still grinding away at 300 baud with modems on BBSs and they were running a full Newgroup/chat forum between thousands of people across the world.
The system still exists as a lot of universities still have an old VMS machines running somewhere. For email and notes, they still work great.
This is what should be in your article, IMO, as it's fascinating and much more than a simple attribution.
Yes, I know what their minimum wage drones say, but the fact is that I took the precautions of upgrading all of the.net and drivers and such and it worked fine. Most of the changes appear to have to do with security, and networking, so it seemed like a logical precaution.
I also suspect that XP Pro has been extensively tested and other versions may be less than 100% compatible. People are reporting that it's messing up their networking and built-in peripherals are no longer functional, especially on laptops, so it's obviously not Norton running or any other nonsense.
I was running Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Spybot, and Spy Hunter all at once and it installed fine - I just ignored the popup windows as usual. It did pop up about a dozen "allow this change" messages, which I did.
That "uninstall security software" is similar to the typical nonsense that you get with ISP support calls.d It's because they are reading from a script.
"Yes, I double checked the DNS. Yes, I ran a traceroute. Yes, I can see and log into the router.. Yes, I rebooted the modem..."
Five minutes of B.S. to get them to bother to check that the problem is on their end.
From what I can tell, the problem is that it's conflicting with networking drivers, which are a kludge in a lot of cases. Of the changes, five of the eight are networking and permissions based, and my guess is that the machines with problems are either:
A:Not running the latest.Net framework. B:They are using some half-baked onboard networking adapter that the company in question needs to upgrade the drivers on. That a lot of the complaints seem to be coming from laptops points to a likely problem with non-compliant hardware and drivers.
Doubly so since a clean install seems to fix it for many people. I'd recommend if your machine is having a problem, try turning the built-in networking off in the BIOS.
I have a modern PCIe ASUS motherboard and everything works perfectly. I made sure that before I applied the patch that I was up to date with every previous patch and had upgraded windows media, Java, direct X, my drivers, and.net to the latest stable versions. The install took a few minutes since everything in the patch was pretty much already installed and working beforehand.
Oh - I run XP Pro. This version seems to have less issues from what I can tell, which isn't surprising, really.
In my city, the buses and trains stop running just before last call, so transit isn't an option for those who stay out the latest and drink the most. Combined with the sprawling distances, cold winter climate and inadequate supply of taxis, a lot of folks wind up taking the stupid path and driving to and from bars. **** True, but this is patterned after New York City. The cabs never stop running around.
They are a bunch of 60+ year old radicals who probably can't remember the last time they played a video game, if ever. So the idea that this stunt by them is helping it foster a "bad/evil game" image and thereby helping sales... It goes right over their balding heads.
4. There are better ways to communicate, some form of communication that we can't detect at the moment ("sub-space" crap, telepathy, you name it). ****
I think it's simpler than this, even. Any communication traveling at the speed of light(tm) would be a very weak signal that would be pointed at a specific location, much like our space probes currently are. Voyager 1 isn't even a significant distance to the nearest star and it's already almost too faint to pick up.
As such, the need to develop faster than light methods of communication would be one of the first things any civilization living in space would find a way to do, since even with our current technologies, we'd likely not pick up a signal from a colony more than a few dozen light years out. They certainly wouldn't be using radio waves except as a last resort.
Current proposed methods for space-based power transmission mean you need a several mile wide area to collect the energy. OTOH, it would be fairly safe. Like a day at the beach. You might get a sunburn but not much else unless you lived right in the path of the beam. And any hard surface, glass, or sunblock would negate almost all of it. But you need a really large area.
The downside of this, obviously, is that if the beam is made twenty times smaller, you would only need a half mile array of collectors, but anything caught underneath it would be fried in a few minutes. (do the math - 20x smaller is several orders of magnitude more powerful - like using a magnifying glass pointed at the sun at half an inch diameter versus a small dot)
Another thing that this does, obviously, is nerf all hackers and automated programs.
In my case, I'd go one step further and enter my password with a one second pause between characters. Anything automated or even if it has built-in random delays is instant failure.
[quote] That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code. [/quote]
Minor changes are required: "By default, you have no right to RESELL OR REPRESENT AS YOUR OWN someone else's copyrighted work." You can for instance, always make a parody work of something as well as make in-house fixes and edits and so on. And, as pointed out elsewhere, the EULA is null and void because you physically own the hardware and aren't renting it. You can always alter code or programming for any device that you own if you have the ability to do so. Be it a sound card or something as simple as an electrical box that needs an extra hole drilled in it.
Technically he can't distribute it without their blessing, but it's insanely stupid to nerf someone who just solved a problem for you for free. Shoot, if I was running Creative, I'd have hired the guy or made a serious offer. He obviously was brighter than the waste of resources in development.
Compare: Creative nerfs programmer. Creative gets egg on face and retracts threats. Programmer fixes Creative's bad code. Creative hires programmer.
Sounds to me like someone at Creative has been taking cues from Apple's playbook.
I kind of disagree. I think the biggest problem with at least the BattleBots arena was that the hazards weren't potent enough. ****
I think that there should be real obstacles in the arena as well as varying terrains and levels. So, for instance, if you are against a wedge bot, you can just roll up onto a raised area(a few inches higher than the surrounding areas) or maybe move over to the astroturf area.
As for things that damage them, while I'm not a fan, it's mostly because you were right - they lacked any real ability to kill the bots.
1:Remove the edges/gutters. Tossing off or down a pit is lame. 2:Remove the screws and other things at the edges that they can get caught in. 3:Put in very mean weapons in the center and corners - things that are vicious and banned from the normal robots.
Flame throwers, electric shocks, electromagnets, huge spinning hammers(center of course), and so on. Designing your robot would have to take into account the hazards as well.
The worst part is that only one or two types of bots ever got anywhere. There were some very imaginative and cool designs, but none that could compete with a simple wedge.
****
There was one that did amazingly well, though that was different. It had a giant triangle assembly that spun. With 10lb sledgehammers on the ends. Wedge bots were helpless against it because they would get mauled before they could get in range.
Which is why they need to make it *less* restrictive. There are always ways to counter a design.
Add in a few other types of weapons and methods of powering the robot as well. The combat and lethality of the machines needs to be uncreased. ie - allow drills and ball bearings and so on(just make the floor slightly sloped a couple of degrees from the center so stuff rolls off, including dead robots)
The arena needs to have more obstacles and less things that destroy or kill the robots. Leave the destruction to the bots as much as possible.
There were several instances in Battlebots where the two bots couldn't do any damage to each other(most notably wedge bots). The bot must have a weapon capable of damaging the other one(s) that extends from its body. Otherwise you could just make a giant titanium ball and outlast the other bots. That's boring.
I'd also suggest limitations by cost as well as self-built (no sponsors allowed) and other categories.
The guy is clearly either misinformed or an idiot.
Quote: Sweeney: There are many overpriced computers out there. It's like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn't a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. ****
When gaming computers first came out - back in the Apple IIe and Amiga and so on era - the 8 and 16 bit computers of old, the average computer adjusted for inflation was an order or two higher magnitude in cost to today's machine.
$800-$1000 will buy you a superb PC for gaming. That much adjusted for inflation, barely bought you a pair of floppy drive two decades ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II Quote: The original retail price of the computer was US$1298 (with 4 KB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM).
http://apple2history.org/history/ah09.html Quote: The drive mechanism was improved to better read half-tracks on disks (which some copy-protected software used), and at $795 was priced to be less expensive than buying two of the older Disk II drives with a controller card.
$800-$1000 for a good gaming machine is dirt cheap and lots of people DO pay that much. Just look at how many people buy pricey components from NewEgg.
Since it's all made in China anyways and patents mean nothing over there... exactly how is this counterfeit?
Let me make a guess here... It's the same stuff, just without the right paperwork or import tax/fee applied. Kind of like how they claim "Grey Market" versions aren't real despite being from the same company in China.
The Article Misses a Few Critical Components
on
Building a Green PC
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps the best solution of all is to find a way to ditch the fans. A typical system's 5-7 fans eat up a total of 100W, and this is something that the article blithely ignored.
GPU fan Intake fan Exhaust fan Fan on the power supply CPU fan
And that's not counting 2 fan power supplies, northbridge fans, and so on.
Check out this setup I found online:
Silverstone TJ-04, Corsair VX450, E8400 Wolfdale @ 3.6Ghz, Gigabyte P35 DS3R, Scythe Ninja!/bolt through, 2 x 1GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2, HD3870 (859/1300) + Accelero S1, WD 250GB SATA II, Samsung Bk-203 DVD-RAM SATA
74W idle, 190W full 3d/cpu/drives stress test(124W normal use playing games). 2 exhaust fans. Virtually silent.
This was tested with a voltmeter and is actual from-the-wall power draw. Adding up a bunch of parts together on paper and claiming it's "green" is just wrong.
No need for silly "green" technologies - just less fans and some reasonable choices and you're better than the setup in the article. And this is a full-blown E8400 system with a HD3870.
Note: With a passive power supply and a bit of careful choices about the drives, 175W should be doable.
You forget, though, that the batteries cause much greater environmental damage and recycling issues
Myth. Lithium-ion batteries are traditionally made from nontoxic lithium carbonate (often used in ovenware), nontoxic cobalt oxide (used as a pottery glaze), nontoxic graphite (used in pencils), and a polymer (plastic) membrane, all with a nontoxic electrolyte. You're mixing up lead-acid and nickel-cadmium batteries with more modern NiMH and li-ion batteries. I can see it now... batteries catching on fire. Toyota won't put these in the Prius for a reason, so Li-Ion are out for vehicles due to potential safety issues in a crash. So that leaves... yeah, it's no as "green" as the eco-weenies wold like you to think.
Compressed air is more similar to steam power than anything else, and old steam locomotives are still known to run just fine. The compressor if it's made well will last decades.(often the problem with refrigerators is that they put one that's too small in and/or the coolant leaks out) This would be a simple air pump that can be powered off of any type of electricity.
You forget, though, that the batteries cause much greater environmental damage and recycling issues, plus weigh a LOT more. Air compressors are horrible for efficiency, but they are also capable of running for decades without much upkeep as well as there's no real need to replace them for the life of the car.
Typical home fueling stations for CNG or electric and so on(if you add in the batteries to the equation) add a huge cost up front. A couple of large air tanks, OTOH, aren't much more complex that a typical SCUBA tank.(few hundred dollars of the car's cost, each)
Mythbusters shot propane tanks with handguns in a recent episode and they dented but didn't puncture the tank. That's very strong, indeed. Smash Labs tested Rhino Lining versus an explosion and the thing survived. Put the two together and you can easily vent any escaping gas away from the passengers *if* something actually manages to puncture the tanks that doesn't already kill the passengers outright from the impact.(we're talking hit by a train crash or similar to puncture the tanks)
$4000 in batteries that you pay $5000 for in a Prius add up to a long payback time compared to a less expensive air powered car(or even a typical Corolla or Fit or similar small car)
It's not nearly as simple as wanting more money. To be honest, WOTC seems happy doing what they have been doing all along. It's Hasbro, which is more than 20 times their size that is pulling the strings here. WOTC is merely following orders and making the best of a bad situation. This happens when you're owned by a soulless giant mega-corp. Corporate says do it and you say "yes, boss". There is no discussion permitted, usually. They decree. You implement if you want to keep your jobs.
I've talked to many industry insiders over the last year online(most of whom wish of course to remain anonymous) and the general consensus is that 4.0 is about Hasbro getting anal about IP rights and not about it being a money grab. Hasbro understands dolls and board games and miniatures and the like. Hasbro is also Apple(tm) anal about IP and such and doesn't give a damn about creativity and third party uses for their products. WOTC isn't even 10% of their total sales, after all. (480 million in sales for Hasbro this last year)
So they force WOTC to change enough so that it's not compatible with 3.5 for IP reasons, despite everyone that I've talked to saying that WOTC was more or less happy with 3.5 as it was for the next few years at least.
WOTC of course is doing its best to rush 4.0 to market/make the best of it. They really planned on releasing 4.0 in a few years, so it's unfortunately going to not really be a huge change/improvement like 3.0 was over 2.0.
I feel sorry for them if anything. They honestly don't deserve our anger, but instead, our sympathy for getting their chains yanked. Hopefully they will someday be able to extricate themselves from Hasbro, but it doesn't look too promising at this point.
This is exactly correct, except it isn't WOTC doing this.
Hasbro was facing an all to typical problem. The vast array of third party works and so on, while making their product have a larger amount of people using it, wasn't entirely under their control.
So the suits at Hasbro essentially yanked WOTC's chain and decided to re-release the game in a manner that would cut off third party source material, much like what happened when 3rd Edition came out. Except this time it is for economic and I.P. reasons and not because it's a major overhaul of the system that's needed.
This is the same sort of ill-fated move that Apple made in the 80s when it decided to retain tight control over their products. I'm positive that WOTC is trying to make the best out of this mess, but really, they don't control anything in the decision making process. WOTC is a tiny blip in the overall ledger for Hasbro and they just don't understand that doing this will kill interest in AD&D at a time when it's already hard enough to entice new players to do anything other than waste braincells on WoW or other online games.
It's unfortunately not WOTC wanting us to buy all new material again. Hasbro thinks that by doing this, they will retain complete control and get all the money from AD&D in the future. What will happen is that nobody will be able to release third party material for it without paying fees (note - this is similar to Sony and licensing official titles for Playstation) and it will slowly die off, because the vast array of third party material is what has always made AD&D one of the best games out there despite its age.
"If you check for availability of a website and someone sees you do it and they reserve it before you, it's fair play." When the site that you visit to check on availability does this automatically with their computers seconds after you type in the name, it's hardly fair. I've checked several names in the past that are listed for a nominal fee, but by the time I get to the payment/price page, they have suddenly jumped to thousands of dollars. Then a few days later, they drop back down. When I've re-checked, them the process repeats. In essence, any name that you check is automatically bought up before you get a chance at it in order to bilk you out of extra money.
Likely true about the planned obsolescence. But with massive areas of the country no longer covered, they will surely find some other way to fill in those gaps. It's just too many people to ignore from a revenue standpoint.
My educated guess is that they will use those frequencies to provide some sort of digital replacement service. Really poor speed or voice only), but covers a wide area.
Yes, it's going to be painful for the first year or two, but they have to pull down the old system before they can put in the new ones.
Just like cassette tapes, analog phones are long overdue for a proper burial. It also opens up a nice bit of the spectrum for other uses, which is always a good thing. AND, it makes phones a little bit less expensive as they no longer are required to have an analog fall-back mode(which rarely if ever worked anyways).
You've got to be kidding. All of this talk of ships and cargo and so on is nonsense. We just build a mass accelerator and launch a continuous stream towards a staging area near the earth. That way, you can grab it all once or twice a year when the earth is nearby.
Moving vast amounts of raw materials a few hundred thousand miles is a fraction as complex as going all the way to Titan. Sure, the materials would take a few years to reach us, but once they do start to arrive, it's easy profit. You obviously only need enough speed to reach the earth in a couple of years, not to get them going fast enough to cause major damage to anything on the receiving end.
One facility in orbit and one or two mass drivers. Move the materials up with a space elevator type system. My guess is that a crew of 10-20 people could easily manage it, a lot like they do with oil platforms currently.
Slashdot Mirror
His theories about the Universe aside, which have no bearing on this project, it's well worth funding people like this, mainly because they think outside of the box.
Check this out. One guy who had a crazy idea in his garage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B8srudAUhE
(using sound waves to extract hydrogen from salt water)
Looks interesting at least, and worth possibly funding to see if anything practical can be done with it.
Often the best ideas come from applying simple technology in ways that aren't usually done. From what I can see, Lerner's design should work. Whether or not it can be made to be economical, though, I doubt it. But it certainly looks to be a lot smaller and more compact, which might lead to some interesting uses where normal power generation isn't feasible(moon base, for instance). If the claim that it has less harmful radiation to deal with is true, or if it rids us of the need for turbines, it would be a big step ahead of the current attempts.(which have cost us billions and still not worked, I might add)
Worth 1/8th the cost of a single M1 Abrams tank? I can think of worse things by far to spend our tax money on.
I forgot to add a couple of points of data/history.
The VMS Notes system ran on most every major original university and institution at the time on the original ARPANET. The university that I went to had a dedicated cable running from it 60 miles to U.C. Berkeley where it tied into the rest of the system(this was done way back in the early 70s when the university was created). As such, we could go to their library computers and reserve books and so on as well, and send inter-campus email. Long, long before you even had what we consider to be email today.
When the Notes program was created, you could all would participate in the forums, which was unlike a typical BBS in that it worked like a modern forum. Hopping from one forum to another wasn't very hard and nearly every California State and U.C. campus was linked together this way.
Usenet came much later as a commercial version of the same idea.
But within this group of VMS systems were created many online novels and works of community fiction, just like you typically get on a forum at most websites today. Some grew into actual published works and were often posted in chapters every few weeks to Usenet writing groups, most notably ones like rec.games.frp Fantasy and science fiction made up the vast majority, of course.
Unfortunately, modern internet archives only go back to about the mid 90s so virtually all of this has been lost.
http://www.peldor.com/intro.html
Some, like this still exist. It started out as a collaborative effort for the first few chapters but then he took over and posted online on Usenet until 2000 or so.(about ten years). His work wasn't the first, though - just a notable example that still survives today.
We did the same thing online in 1991 at my university(technically 1985 or so - way before I got there). We had a 20-30 college mini net - a BBS system of sorts where all of their VMS machines were linked together. Vax Notes it was called.
Of course there were collaborative forums - it worked identical to Usenet Newsgroups.
http://www.byeday.net/assets/documents/Camelot%20of%20Collaboration%20Patti%20Anklam.pdf
This was the very first attempt at something like this. Way before you even had any of the other forums/web/etc. Most people were still grinding away at 300 baud with modems on BBSs and they were running a full Newgroup/chat forum between thousands of people across the world.
The system still exists as a lot of universities still have an old VMS machines running somewhere. For email and notes, they still work great.
This is what should be in your article, IMO, as it's fascinating and much more than a simple attribution.
Yes, I know what their minimum wage drones say, but the fact is that I took the precautions of upgrading all of the .net and drivers and such and it worked fine. Most of the changes appear to have to do with security, and networking, so it seemed like a logical precaution.
I also suspect that XP Pro has been extensively tested and other versions may be less than 100% compatible. People are reporting that it's messing up their networking and built-in peripherals are no longer functional, especially on laptops, so it's obviously not Norton running or any other nonsense.
I was running Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Spybot, and Spy Hunter all at once and it installed fine - I just ignored the popup windows as usual. It did pop up about a dozen "allow this change" messages, which I did.
That "uninstall security software" is similar to the typical nonsense that you get with ISP support calls.d It's because they are reading from a script.
"Yes, I double checked the DNS. Yes, I ran a traceroute. Yes, I can see and log into the router.. Yes, I rebooted the modem..."
Five minutes of B.S. to get them to bother to check that the problem is on their end.
It works fine for me.
.Net framework.
.net to the latest stable versions. The install took a few minutes since everything in the patch was pretty much already installed and working beforehand.
Read the white paper about SP3.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/7/687484ed-8174-496d-8db9-f02b40c12982/Overview%20of%20Windows%20XP%20Service%20Pack%203.pdf
From what I can tell, the problem is that it's conflicting with networking drivers, which are a kludge in a lot of cases. Of the changes, five of the eight are networking and permissions based, and my guess is that the machines with problems are either:
A:Not running the latest
B:They are using some half-baked onboard networking adapter that the company in question needs to upgrade the drivers on. That a lot of the complaints seem to be coming from laptops points to a likely problem with non-compliant hardware and drivers.
Doubly so since a clean install seems to fix it for many people. I'd recommend if your machine is having a problem, try turning the built-in networking off in the BIOS.
I have a modern PCIe ASUS motherboard and everything works perfectly. I made sure that before I applied the patch that I was up to date with every previous patch and had upgraded windows media, Java, direct X, my drivers, and
Oh - I run XP Pro. This version seems to have less issues from what I can tell, which isn't surprising, really.
In my city, the buses and trains stop running just before last call, so transit isn't an option for those who stay out the latest and drink the most. Combined with the sprawling distances, cold winter climate and inadequate supply of taxis, a lot of folks wind up taking the stupid path and driving to and from bars.
****
True, but this is patterned after New York City. The cabs never stop running around.
They are a bunch of 60+ year old radicals who probably can't remember the last time they played a video game, if ever. So the idea that this stunt by them is helping it foster a "bad/evil game" image and thereby helping sales... It goes right over their balding heads.
4. There are better ways to communicate, some form of communication that we can't detect at the moment ("sub-space" crap, telepathy, you name it).
****
I think it's simpler than this, even. Any communication traveling at the speed of light(tm) would be a very weak signal that would be pointed at a specific location, much like our space probes currently are. Voyager 1 isn't even a significant distance to the nearest star and it's already almost too faint to pick up.
As such, the need to develop faster than light methods of communication would be one of the first things any civilization living in space would find a way to do, since even with our current technologies, we'd likely not pick up a signal from a colony more than a few dozen light years out. They certainly wouldn't be using radio waves except as a last resort.
Current proposed methods for space-based power transmission mean you need a several mile wide area to collect the energy. OTOH, it would be fairly safe. Like a day at the beach. You might get a sunburn but not much else unless you lived right in the path of the beam. And any hard surface, glass, or sunblock would negate almost all of it. But you need a really large area.
The downside of this, obviously, is that if the beam is made twenty times smaller, you would only need a half mile array of collectors, but anything caught underneath it would be fried in a few minutes. (do the math - 20x smaller is several orders of magnitude more powerful - like using a magnifying glass pointed at the sun at half an inch diameter versus a small dot)
Let's hope the aim never gets off.
Another thing that this does, obviously, is nerf all hackers and automated programs.
In my case, I'd go one step further and enter my password with a one second pause between characters. Anything automated or even if it has built-in random delays is instant failure.
[quote]
That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code.
[/quote]
Minor changes are required:
"By default, you have no right to RESELL OR REPRESENT AS YOUR OWN someone else's copyrighted work." You can for instance, always make a parody work of something as well as make in-house fixes and edits and so on. And, as pointed out elsewhere, the EULA is null and void because you physically own the hardware and aren't renting it. You can always alter code or programming for any device that you own if you have the ability to do so. Be it a sound card or something as simple as an electrical box that needs an extra hole drilled in it.
Technically he can't distribute it without their blessing, but it's insanely stupid to nerf someone who just solved a problem for you for free. Shoot, if I was running Creative, I'd have hired the guy or made a serious offer. He obviously was brighter than the waste of resources in development.
Compare:
Creative nerfs programmer. Creative gets egg on face and retracts threats.
Programmer fixes Creative's bad code. Creative hires programmer.
Sounds to me like someone at Creative has been taking cues from Apple's playbook.
I kind of disagree. I think the biggest problem with at least the BattleBots arena was that the hazards weren't potent enough.
****
I think that there should be real obstacles in the arena as well as varying terrains and levels. So, for instance, if you are against a wedge bot, you can just roll up onto a raised area(a few inches higher than the surrounding areas) or maybe move over to the astroturf area.
As for things that damage them, while I'm not a fan, it's mostly because you were right - they lacked any real ability to kill the bots.
1:Remove the edges/gutters. Tossing off or down a pit is lame.
2:Remove the screws and other things at the edges that they can get caught in.
3:Put in very mean weapons in the center and corners - things that are vicious and banned from the normal robots.
Flame throwers, electric shocks, electromagnets, huge spinning hammers(center of course), and so on. Designing your robot would have to take into account the hazards as well.
The worst part is that only one or two types of bots ever got anywhere. There were some very imaginative and cool designs, but none that could compete with a simple wedge.
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There was one that did amazingly well, though that was different. It had a giant triangle assembly that spun. With 10lb sledgehammers on the ends. Wedge bots were helpless against it because they would get mauled before they could get in range.
Which is why they need to make it *less* restrictive. There are always ways to counter a design.
Add in a few other types of weapons and methods of powering the robot as well. The combat and lethality of the machines needs to be uncreased. ie - allow drills and ball bearings and so on(just make the floor slightly sloped a couple of degrees from the center so stuff rolls off, including dead robots)
The arena needs to have more obstacles and less things that destroy or kill the robots. Leave the destruction to the bots as much as possible.
There were several instances in Battlebots where the two bots couldn't do any damage to each other(most notably wedge bots). The bot must have a weapon capable of damaging the other one(s) that extends from its body. Otherwise you could just make a giant titanium ball and outlast the other bots. That's boring.
I'd also suggest limitations by cost as well as self-built (no sponsors allowed) and other categories.
The guy is clearly either misinformed or an idiot.
Quote:
Sweeney: There are many overpriced computers out there. It's like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn't a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that.
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When gaming computers first came out - back in the Apple IIe and Amiga and so on era - the 8 and 16 bit computers of old, the average computer adjusted for inflation was an order or two higher magnitude in cost to today's machine.
$800-$1000 will buy you a superb PC for gaming. That much adjusted for inflation, barely bought you a pair of floppy drive two decades ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
Quote:
The original retail price of the computer was US$1298 (with 4 KB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM).
http://apple2history.org/history/ah09.html
Quote:
The drive mechanism was improved to better read half-tracks on disks (which some copy-protected software used), and at $795 was priced to be less expensive than buying two of the older Disk II drives with a controller card.
$800-$1000 for a good gaming machine is dirt cheap and lots of people DO pay that much. Just look at how many people buy pricey components from NewEgg.
Well, duh...
It's the only way us older folks can keep up with those 15 year olds online.
Since it's all made in China anyways and patents mean nothing over there... exactly how is this counterfeit?
Let me make a guess here... It's the same stuff, just without the right paperwork or import tax/fee applied. Kind of like how they claim "Grey Market" versions aren't real despite being from the same company in China.
Perhaps the best solution of all is to find a way to ditch the fans. A typical system's 5-7 fans eat up a total of 100W, and this is something that the article blithely ignored.
GPU fan
Intake fan
Exhaust fan
Fan on the power supply
CPU fan
And that's not counting 2 fan power supplies, northbridge fans, and so on.
Check out this setup I found online:
Silverstone TJ-04, Corsair VX450, E8400 Wolfdale @ 3.6Ghz, Gigabyte P35 DS3R, Scythe Ninja!/bolt through, 2 x 1GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2, HD3870 (859/1300) + Accelero S1, WD 250GB SATA II, Samsung Bk-203 DVD-RAM SATA
74W idle, 190W full 3d/cpu/drives stress test(124W normal use playing games). 2 exhaust fans. Virtually silent.
This was tested with a voltmeter and is actual from-the-wall power draw. Adding up a bunch of parts together on paper and claiming it's "green" is just wrong.
No need for silly "green" technologies - just less fans and some reasonable choices and you're better than the setup in the article. And this is a full-blown E8400 system with a HD3870.
Note: With a passive power supply and a bit of careful choices about the drives, 175W should be doable.
Myth. Lithium-ion batteries are traditionally made from nontoxic lithium carbonate (often used in ovenware), nontoxic cobalt oxide (used as a pottery glaze), nontoxic graphite (used in pencils), and a polymer (plastic) membrane, all with a nontoxic electrolyte. You're mixing up lead-acid and nickel-cadmium batteries with more modern NiMH and li-ion batteries. I can see it now... batteries catching on fire. Toyota won't put these in the Prius for a reason, so Li-Ion are out for vehicles due to potential safety issues in a crash. So that leaves... yeah, it's no as "green" as the eco-weenies wold like you to think.
Compressed air is more similar to steam power than anything else, and old steam locomotives are still known to run just fine. The compressor if it's made well will last decades.(often the problem with refrigerators is that they put one that's too small in and/or the coolant leaks out) This would be a simple air pump that can be powered off of any type of electricity.
You forget, though, that the batteries cause much greater environmental damage and recycling issues, plus weigh a LOT more. Air compressors are horrible for efficiency, but they are also capable of running for decades without much upkeep as well as there's no real need to replace them for the life of the car.
Typical home fueling stations for CNG or electric and so on(if you add in the batteries to the equation) add a huge cost up front. A couple of large air tanks, OTOH, aren't much more complex that a typical SCUBA tank.(few hundred dollars of the car's cost, each)
Mythbusters shot propane tanks with handguns in a recent episode and they dented but didn't puncture the tank. That's very strong, indeed. Smash Labs tested Rhino Lining versus an explosion and the thing survived. Put the two together and you can easily vent any escaping gas away from the passengers *if* something actually manages to puncture the tanks that doesn't already kill the passengers outright from the impact.(we're talking hit by a train crash or similar to puncture the tanks)
$4000 in batteries that you pay $5000 for in a Prius add up to a long payback time compared to a less expensive air powered car(or even a typical Corolla or Fit or similar small car)
It's not nearly as simple as wanting more money. To be honest, WOTC seems happy doing what they have been doing all along. It's Hasbro, which is more than 20 times their size that is pulling the strings here. WOTC is merely following orders and making the best of a bad situation. This happens when you're owned by a soulless giant mega-corp. Corporate says do it and you say "yes, boss". There is no discussion permitted, usually. They decree. You implement if you want to keep your jobs.
I've talked to many industry insiders over the last year online(most of whom wish of course to remain anonymous) and the general consensus is that 4.0 is about Hasbro getting anal about IP rights and not about it being a money grab. Hasbro understands dolls and board games and miniatures and the like. Hasbro is also Apple(tm) anal about IP and such and doesn't give a damn about creativity and third party uses for their products. WOTC isn't even 10% of their total sales, after all. (480 million in sales for Hasbro this last year)
So they force WOTC to change enough so that it's not compatible with 3.5 for IP reasons, despite everyone that I've talked to saying that WOTC was more or less happy with 3.5 as it was for the next few years at least.
WOTC of course is doing its best to rush 4.0 to market/make the best of it. They really planned on releasing 4.0 in a few years, so it's unfortunately going to not really be a huge change/improvement like 3.0 was over 2.0.
I feel sorry for them if anything. They honestly don't deserve our anger, but instead, our sympathy for getting their chains yanked. Hopefully they will someday be able to extricate themselves from Hasbro, but it doesn't look too promising at this point.
This is exactly correct, except it isn't WOTC doing this.
Hasbro was facing an all to typical problem. The vast array of third party works and so on, while making their product have a larger amount of people using it, wasn't entirely under their control.
So the suits at Hasbro essentially yanked WOTC's chain and decided to re-release the game in a manner that would cut off third party source material, much like what happened when 3rd Edition came out. Except this time it is for economic and I.P. reasons and not because it's a major overhaul of the system that's needed.
This is the same sort of ill-fated move that Apple made in the 80s when it decided to retain tight control over their products. I'm positive that WOTC is trying to make the best out of this mess, but really, they don't control anything in the decision making process. WOTC is a tiny blip in the overall ledger for Hasbro and they just don't understand that doing this will kill interest in AD&D at a time when it's already hard enough to entice new players to do anything other than waste braincells on WoW or other online games.
It's unfortunately not WOTC wanting us to buy all new material again. Hasbro thinks that by doing this, they will retain complete control and get all the money from AD&D in the future. What will happen is that nobody will be able to release third party material for it without paying fees (note - this is similar to Sony and licensing official titles for Playstation) and it will slowly die off, because the vast array of third party material is what has always made AD&D one of the best games out there despite its age.
Fair? Hardly.
Likely true about the planned obsolescence. But with massive areas of the country no longer covered, they will surely find some other way to fill in those gaps. It's just too many people to ignore from a revenue standpoint.
My educated guess is that they will use those frequencies to provide some sort of digital replacement service. Really poor speed or voice only), but covers a wide area.
Yes, it's going to be painful for the first year or two, but they have to pull down the old system before they can put in the new ones.
Just like cassette tapes, analog phones are long overdue for a proper burial. It also opens up a nice bit of the spectrum for other uses, which is always a good thing. AND, it makes phones a little bit less expensive as they no longer are required to have an analog fall-back mode(which rarely if ever worked anyways).
You've got to be kidding. All of this talk of ships and cargo and so on is nonsense. We just build a mass accelerator and launch a continuous stream towards a staging area near the earth. That way, you can grab it all once or twice a year when the earth is nearby.
Moving vast amounts of raw materials a few hundred thousand miles is a fraction as complex as going all the way to Titan. Sure, the materials would take a few years to reach us, but once they do start to arrive, it's easy profit. You obviously only need enough speed to reach the earth in a couple of years, not to get them going fast enough to cause major damage to anything on the receiving end.
One facility in orbit and one or two mass drivers. Move the materials up with a space elevator type system. My guess is that a crew of 10-20 people could easily manage it, a lot like they do with oil platforms currently.